


As The World Caves In

by MaryaDmitrievnaLikesSundays



Category: This is How You Lose the Time War - Amal El-Mohtar & Max Gladstone
Genre: Angst, Character Death, Death, Domestic Fluff, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, End of the World, F/F, Hurt/Comfort, Letters, Love Letters, Memories, Romance
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-01
Updated: 2021-02-01
Packaged: 2021-03-12 14:14:11
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,754
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29136891
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MaryaDmitrievnaLikesSundays/pseuds/MaryaDmitrievnaLikesSundays
Summary: But now, Red was ready. She was ready.She and Blue had hidden themselves at the end of the timeline, braiding together half-burned strands and Shifting the past into the future until they had created something more like an alternate dimension than a part of the known world. The Agency and Garden had tried to find them, for a while, but they couldn’t. They never stood a chance.The nature of this hidden dimension was the reason why, when Garden and the Agency burned each other out, destroying the fabric of reality, disintegrating time from the start of the braid down, Blue and Red could watch it all happen, every inch as it turned to dust and fell into oblivion.——Or, after eons of living in peace, Red and Blue watch from the edge of the universe as Everything comes to a close.
Relationships: Blue/Red, Blue/Red (This is How You Lose the Time War)
Comments: 1
Kudos: 7





	As The World Caves In

**Author's Note:**

> There’s not enough fics in this fandom so I Am Here

Red was ready to watch the world burn.

Once, maybe, she would have been angry. Angry at Garden for destroying the world, angry at the Agency for letting them. Angry at herself, for not having any sort of hand in the destruction of the universe.

Maybe she would have been sad, doomed by the Chaos Oracle. She would have sobbed into the dirt at the edge of everything and wondered if this was always how it was going to end.

But now, she was ready. She was ready.

She and Blue had hidden themselves at the end of the timeline, braiding together half-burned strands and Shifting the past into the future until they had created something more like an alternate dimension than a part of the known world. The Agency and Garden had tried to find them, for a while, but they couldn’t. They never stood a chance.

The nature of this hidden dimension was the reason why, when Garden and the Agency burned each other out, destroying the fabric of reality, disintegrating time from the start of the braid down, Blue and Red could watch it all happen, every inch as it turned to dust and fell into oblivion.

The spectacle, at the present moment, was nothing more than a glimmer amongst the stars, unnoticeable if one didn’t know what they were looking for. Red and Blue, of course, did. It was the only star that wasn’t an eye.

Red broke her stare to look at Blue. They sat on the roof of their home, a cottage and a castle and a brick flat smashed into one beautiful puzzle, a conglomerate of memories stolen from different strands. The garden below was full of berries and flowers and long, green grasses. Looking down at the vegetation and brick-wood-metal-gold structure, Red could almost believe that nothing was happening ten millennia away.

But she wasn’t looking at any of that. She was watching Blue. Her dark skin, smooth over high cheekbones and almond eyes. Her lips, full and serious. Her hair, black coils piled on her head like a crown, adorned with little gold clips she had stolen from that god’s temple, so many Shifts ago.

Red didn’t need to look. She had this face memorized, burned into her hardware retinas. Every time she shut her eyes, she saw the sky, the ice, the sweet bluebell. 

Blue looked back. Their eyes met. Blue finally smiled.

“So,” she said, her tone casual, like they were meeting for tea, “which Strand do you think it started in?”

Red thought for a minute. “332,” she replied. “If it was Garden’s home battle. Or 19, if it was the Agency’s.”

Blue nodded. “Garden always loved that fucking Strand.” She tilted her head. “I thought it was overrated.”

“What part? The temples? Or the Atlantis?”

“God, that Atlantis,” Blue laughed. “I tore it down three separate times before it ever stuck.”

Red felt her own lips split into a grin. “Pretty sure I raised it back up at least once.”

“I am, too. No other agent leaves a lava fall as a signature.”

Red rolled her eyes. Blue turned back to the spectacle, that sparkle of discontainment growing larger every second. For once, the trickle of time was linear.

But Red did not look away. She stared at this woman, the face that she chose to make permanent once she’d disconnected from the Garden’s powers. Her eyes were unafraid as they watched the knots of the universe untangle and fly outwards. Red knew she could, too, if she used the enhancements the Agency had placed in her once-human pupils. But she didn’t want to. All she wanted to see was Blue.

Red looked, and she remembered.

She remembered the moment they’d finished their complex tangling of time and its branches. They collapsed on the grass, their little patch of existence, the only place where the strands that they tirelessly crossed made sense. They were breathing hard, feeling the flora beneath them, and knowing that finally, finally, finally, they had ended the chase.

She remembered the days after, rearranging their careful design, crossing strand over strand to expand their world through the Chaos they had created, the Chaos under the control of no Oracle at all.

She remembered when they had succeeded. When they had more than just a few square acres of grass. It was a beautiful moment, clear as day in Red’s mind.

(She enjoyed hoarding all of her memories, now that Commander couldn’t take them from her).

She had been lazily braiding Blue’s hair, her fingers practiced and sure from her work amongst the universe. Something flashed across her vision, breaking through the endless expanse of black space—a bird, small and deep purple, settling into a tree that hadn’t existed a few moments before.

She pointed it out to Blue, who sat up and smiled.

“It’s working,” she said.

“It’s working,” Red had agreed.

And work it did. Now, on the roof, Red looked out over the expanse they had created together—lush forests full of trees from a million different worlds, waterfalls crashing into glowing pools, photocopies of dozens of Londons across space and time. And so, so many birds. Birds that didn’t exist yet, birds that were long since extinct, birds that were only alive in this tiny, hidden pocket of life.

Red was a little sad to see this place go. She had considered trying to isolate a bubble of time, code a message within a message to keep some memory alive. She knew she could do it, she was more than capable, but no. She was tired of the games. She was tired of puzzles that could never be solved, labyrinths with no exits. This would be an honest exit.

The light was getting brighter, taking up a chunk of the sky larger than the moon they had stolen from Strand 459’s New Jupiter. Red didn’t have to use her optic enhancements to see how it was devouring all that was, reducing it to fragments of time and dust in a single second, and erasing all concept of it in the next. It would be beautiful, perhaps, if she were watching from afar, instead of staring down the barrel.

Blue sighed next to her. She was swinging her feet over the edge of the roof, the gray fabric of her dress catching the light of the moons. 

(No stars. They never brought in stars. No, the only eyes in this world were the ones that Blue and Red created themselves.)

“How many times do you think this has happened?”

Red blinked. “What do you mean?”

“I mean,” Blue said, leaning forwards, “Everything we can ever think of has already happened infinite times. So how many times has this happened?”

Red stared into Blue’s intense eyes.

“I think this is our first time watching a first time.”

Blue smiled, and everything disappeared for a moment as she leaned in to kiss Red. It was sweet, gentle, both of them grinning into it. Blue pulled away, but left her hand on Red’s shoulder, stroking the skin with her thumb.

The glitter of destruction was too close to ignore, now. Red felt it pulling at her mind, stealing memories, drawing them out from her eyes and nose and mouth and pores.

She remembered her first mission, how she’d expected to feel scared, but there was an odd calm within her. A calm known by none of her other officers. A calm that she had gained from that moment she was alone, alone except for Blue, who had saved her before she was even awake.

She remembered the promotions, the wars, the killing and killing and killing that never amounted to anything because these exact people would just be born again a few strands over. She remembered blood spilling over her hands, warm and crimson. Her namesake.

She remembered the letters, the hunger that filled her with each one. She was not new to hunger, but this was something different—she shared this hunger with Blue. They were both starving, skin and bone, each letter a single pomegranate seed.

Then. Then breaking free. Then seeing Blue as her cell became ash, and finally, she was satiated. Finally, for the first time in her life, she was truly full.

She tried to hold her mind together, to keep these memories for herself, but the fire was racing downthread towards them, the light taking up nearly the entire sky. Leaves from the trees started to fade away, and Red found that she couldn’t quite remember what color they were. She found that these next memories were so delicious, she didn’t even care.

Red and Blue, building. Building this new life, free from the rules of the war, of space, of anything. Creating a world that was entirely their own, made to feed their hunger.

Of course, the world was never what satisfied them. It was each other. It always had been.

Red, waking up each morning to Blue’s gently sleeping form. Blue, playing with Red’s hair in the stolen sunlight. Cooking together, playing chess, reading, reading, reading. And writing. They didn’t have to, but they could, now. No codes, nothing hidden, just pen on paper, left in the open for the other to find.

Blue’s fingers tightened on Red’s shoulder as the forest shimmered and rippled, as the sounds of every war and laugh and scream they had ever heard swelled around them. Red fumbled, then found Blue’s hand with her own, gripped it tightly between them. Blue held her hand back, fiercely.

The ground crumbled beneath them. If Red were human, she would have long been blind for staring at the destruction that her mind was not born to comprehend. Memories and memories and memories flowed out of her, then slipped away forever.

The air in front of them was sucked away, and Red had only a second to turn her head, tear her eyes away from the beauty of it all, and look at Blue.

Blue met her eyes at the same time, and she smiled.

The last of Red’s memories were taken from her. 

Her body fell to oblivion, leaving her mind untethered for the single moment that it could survive on its own.

_ Blue,_ she thought, with all of the love felt by every creature in every universe across every strand, every braid possible in the infinity of time.

Then, the last blade of grass went up in smoke,

and finally,

finally,

finally,

it was over.

**Author's Note:**

> Y’all Mfs better COMMENT


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